Three-Part Heartbreak in Motown

Dreamgirls

The dramatic and musical peak of “Dreamgirls” — the showstopper, the main reason to see the movie — comes around midpoint, when Jennifer Hudson, playing Effie White, sings “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” That song has been this musical’s calling card since the first Broadway production 25 years ago, but to see Ms. Hudson tear into it on screen nonetheless brings the goose-bumped thrill of witnessing something new, even historic. A former Disney cruise-ship entertainer with a physique to match her robust voice, Ms. Hudson was notoriously dismissed from “American Idol.” This sad instance of pop-cultural philistinism is echoed on the cover of the January 2007 issue of Vanity Fair, which omits her in favor of her better-known, thinner “Dreamgirls” co-stars Eddie Murphy, Jamie Foxx and Beyoncé Knowles.

Of course such slights are consistent with the character Ms. Hudson plays in Bill Condon’s film version of the show, originally written by Henry Krieger (music) and Tom Eyen (book and lyrics). Effie is, at first, the lead singer in a Detroit vocal trio called the Dreamettes (later the Dreams), and also the lover of Curtis Taylor Jr. (Mr. Foxx), the car salesman turned musical entrepreneur who serves as the group’s manager. She is replaced, both onstage and in Curtis’s affections, by Deena Jones (Ms. Knowles), her skinnier, lighter-skinned and more pliable sidekick, and relegated to poverty and obscurity while the group ascends into the pop firmament (and also leaves the crumbling Motor City for Los Angeles).

“And I Am Telling You,” for all the defiance of its lyric and the triumphal swell of its orchestration, is thus an anthem of impotence, a proud woman’s protest in the face of humiliation and defeat. Like it or not, Effie is going. She has no choice in the matter. But it’s not often you go to the movies and see a big-boned, sexually assertive, self-confident black woman — not played for laughs or impersonated by a male comedian in drag — holding the middle of the screen. And when was the last time you saw a first-time film actress upstage an Oscar winner, a pop diva and a movie star of long standing? Ms. Hudson is not going anywhere. She has arrived.

The vehicle that delivers her, however, does not always run smoothly. “Dreamgirls” is a souped-up, collectors’-edition replica of a model that Detroit — I mean Hollywood — used to turn out with ease and regularity. At the moment, and maybe only for a moment, stage musicals seem to be in reasonably good health, with solid revivals and lively new shows filling Broadway theaters. At the multiplexes, however, it’s a grimmer story.

Periodic attempts to reinvigorate the form have a way of embalming it in nostalgia or tricking it out with frantic novelty. Or both. See “Moulin Rouge.” Audiences who go to “Dreamgirls” will have a good time, but they’ll be going for old time’s sake rather than to encounter anything vital or new.

Photo

Left to right, Anika Noni Rose, Beyoncé Knowles and Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls, based on the Broadway hit.Credit
David James/Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks

And if “Dreamgirls” is disappointing, it is not for lack of effort by Mr. Condon or his cast, who do their best to combine the big, showy gestures of stage performance with the finer-grained demands of naturalistic screen acting. Like Mr. Condon’s other films — “Gods and Monsters,”“Kinsey” and “Chicago” (which he wrote but did not direct) — “Dreamgirls” takes place at the intersection of fame and desire, where sexual longing gets mixed up with hunger for public recognition.

No one in the movie expresses this tension better than Mr. Murphy, whose character, a soul singer named James (Thunder) Early, fights addiction, obsolescence and the demands of his own ego. Resorting frequently to the shorthand of montage, Mr. Condon for the most part succeeds in sustaining a narrative and emotional flow that links one song to the next.

But the problem with “Dreamgirls” — and it is not a small one — lies in those songs, which are not just musically and lyrically pedestrian, but historically and idiomatically disastrous. This is a musical, after all, about music, about an especially vibrant and mutable strain of rhythm and blues that proclaimed itself, boastfully but not inaccurately, to be “the sound of young America.”

Curtis is modeled — loosely enough to escape litigation — on Berry Gordy Jr., who turned Motown from a regional record label into a powerhouse. (The Dreams are a parallel-universe version of the Supremes.) The story of Curtis’s Rainbow Records is a familiar and potent tale of Faustian show-business ambition, as his climb to the top involves betraying and hurting the people closest to him. But without the right soundtrack, only half the story is being told. The performances are gratifyingly spirited, but what this movie most obviously lacks is soul.

The great Motown songwriters — Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, the trio of geniuses known to posterity as Holland-Dozier-Holland — turned out great pop songs by the dozen, cutting bolts of blues, gospel and rock ’n’ roll into clean, trim, shiny garments. It is vain to imagine that Mr. Krieger and Mr. Eyen, who died in 1991, could replicate the Motown sound in all its variety, but as it is, the film barely acknowledges its existence.

As the cushioned blasts of overorchestrated thunder assaulted my ears, I would have given anything for a crisp horn chart, a clean drum line, a chattering rhythm guitar or even a memorably witty or catchy verse. Periodically, a character — Curtis, James or Effie’s songwriter brother C. C. (Keith Robinson) — will announce the arrival of a “new sound.” But even though the chronology and the costumes march from doo-wop to disco, everything in “Dreamgirls” sounds more or less the same, as the splashy imperatives of show-tune composing overwhelm everything in their path.

The music has the effect of compromising one of the crucial ambitions of the film: to refract the recent history of black America (and, by implication, America itself) through the prism of popular culture. Part of Curtis’s dream is to cross over and in the process permanently redefine the mainstream, and you hear a lot of talk about what kind of music will appeal to black or white ears.

You also see archival images (the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; riots in Detroit) that register the aspirations and disappointments of America in the 1960s. But the music provides no guidance through the times, and as it tries to negotiate a period of profound change, it comes to rely on the talents of its production and costume designers, John Myhre and Sharen Davis, both of whom do brilliant work. The decades are marked by the progression of hairstyles, lapels, jewelry and dresses; after a while the experience starts to feel like a long, noisy guided tour through a museum.

Except of course that the dioramas occasionally spring to life when the singers transcend the limitations of the songs. This happens, most memorably, twice: when Ms. Hudson lays claim to “And I Am Telling You,” and when Ms. Knowles, late in the movie, lets loose in a recording booth on “Listen,” one of a handful of new songs written for the film.

Until that point her character, Deena, has been something of an enigma and, for Curtis, the passive vessel of his ambitions. Ms. Knowles’s performance has been static and detached. In her limited work in movies she has never seemed comfortable with acting, shying away from any emotional display that might compromise her steely, hieratic dignity. But when she sings, she is capable of warmth, vulnerability, even ferocity, all of which she demonstrates in “Listen.” You cannot help but obey the imperative of the song’s title, even as you may wish the movie offered more that was worth listening to.

Directed by Bill Condon; written for the screen by Mr. Condon, based on the Broadway production, book by Tom Eyen, directed and choreographed by Michael Bennett; director of photography, Tobias Schliessler; edited by Virginia Katz; music by Henry Krieger, lyrics by Mr. Eyen; choreography by Fatima Robinson; production designer, John Myhre; produced by Laurence Mark; released by DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures. Running time: 131 minutes.